[proposed press statement] .... This has come to be known as the Wiretap chip since it allows any Law Enforcement agency to automatically decrypt any conversations made with it with a search warrant. ...
I understand there are some situations where law enforcement agencies can gain access to keys _without_ a search warrant, and furthermore access to the keys allows wiretapping of conversations that go well beyond the scope of the search warrant. This might be better phrased "with, or in many cases even without, a search warrant". Does anybody know of specific examples of wiretapping without a search warrant, or beyond the scope of the search warrant that we can cite? Especially famous ones (didn't Nixon wiretap somebody?) Question: does there need to be a warrant to search *both* parties in a conversation, or just one? What if one of the parties is a foreign citizen calling from their homeland? What about conference calls? In addition to lawyer-client and doctor-patient conversations, ubiquity of the wiretap chip allows the U.S. government exclusive access to recording the following calls under the rubric of a "secure" system: * husband-wife * psychologist-client * priest-confessor * foreign tourists, businessmen, and diplomats * international phone calls * phone calls outside the U.S. involving Clipper phones (last I heard AT&T was planning to export the wiretap chip phone, can that be verified?) * etc. We might design a special press release to be sent to the *international* press and foreign companies. We might especially target electronics giants like Matsushita, Phillips, Siemens, Fujitsu, NEC, etc. that can make alternative chips if they feel there is market demand for privacy from U.S. spooks who speak of using the wiretap chip to "enhance U.S. economic competitiveness". This might be a joint venture with U.S. companies like Security Technologies Inc. that AT&T and the U.S. government have screwed with their collusion. The vast majority of consumer-product chips are manufactured outside the U.S. It is doubtful that VLSI can compete, much less corner the market if international concern is raised over the potential U.S. wiretapping monopoly. However, we do need to do this in such a way that we do not encourage foreign government escrow-key schemes. Let's use the term "wiretap chip" for the entire class of escrow-key hardware schemes. I think we have a shot at giving the entire class of Denning-style schemes a bad reputation in the international community. One desirable foreign government action would be to ban the import of phone equipment containing escrow-key chips from the U.S.; a very undesirable outcome is for foreign governments to set up their own escrow-key systems. Primarily, we want to give wiretap chips a bad reputation in the market. We also need to dig up information on the phone call archives being kept by the NSA and other agencies. How extensive are they? Is there any guarantee phone calls will be deleted after some period, or are phone calls once tapped stored forever on some CD-ROM? Can foreign companies operating in the U.S. have any confidence that the U.S. government is not wiretapping their phones, gleaning trade secrets and distributing them to favored U.S. megacorps like AT&T? If we don't have answers to these questions we need to ask them, in public and often. Nick Szabo szabo@techbook.com